Pre-Hel lenic Latin poetry. When we refer to Latin poetry before the Greek influence, we are either talking of an assumed and hypothetical literature like that of which Macaulay has given us such ingenious and eloquent specimens in his "Lays of Ancient Rome," or else of writings and documents which have nothing but the name in common with poetry as we now understand the word. Cicero, indeed, tells us that Appius Claudius Caecus wrote a poem of a gnomic character which he calls Pythagorean. If he did, it is interesting to find that didactic poetry was not only Rome's greatest success, but her earliest attempt. But for the rest, early Roman poetry, which was then called scriptura, was used only for state documents, lists and records, and the poets were called scribae. The poems, carmina, were laws such as those of the Twelve Tables, treaties of the kings with Gabii and the Sabines, pontifical books, and such like, and were written in Saturnian verse. Beside these there were rustic litanies, and those chants at festivals and funerals in praise of ancestors and founders of families, of which Cicero speaks, and on which Macaulay based his theory of a lost Latin ballad poetry. To these must be added the Fescennine strains in which peasants bantered each other at rustic merry-makings, and from which more or less directly rose three kinds of composition in which Roman writers achieved high success, comedy, satire, and amoebaean pastoral poetry. EFFECT OF GREEK LITERATURE Effect of 5 But all these pale dawnings of art faded into mist before the sunburst of Greek literature. To apply to it the eulogy of Greek Lucretius on Epicurus, Greek literature extinguished everything on which its radiance burst, literature. which beset the rise of "E'en as the Sun uprisen quenches the fires of Night."1 The first and greatest debt to Greece was the Drama, the popularity of which at Rome Difficulties has been greatly underrated. It is true that it had to struggle with certain diffi- the Drama. culties which it did not meet in Greece, and to which in modern times it is not exposed. The Romans unquestionably looked on the expression of grief as unmanly. Cicero condemns Sophocles for allowing Philoctetes to utter cries of pain, and for suffering Heracles to give voice to his agony in the death scene in the "Trachiniae;" and commends Pacuvius for putting no lamentations into the mouth of Ulysses when dying of the wound inflicted by his son Telegonus. Pacuvius expresses the Roman feeling when he says that 66 “A man may rail against the strokes of Fortune, But not bewail them: that were woman's part." 2 Attius tells us that the best comfort in affliction is the hope that we have concealed our wound. the "Telamon" of Ennius, the father, hearing of 1 "Restinxit stellas exortus ut aetherius Sol." 266 In Conqueri fortunam adversam non lamentari decet ; the death of his son Ajax, says that, when he sent him to Troy to fight for his fatherland, he knew that he sent him "To deadly strife, not to a festival." 991 Such a theory as to the limits within which the expression of grief ought to be confined would of course be adverse to the production of genuine tragedy, and would rather favor the rise of those so-called tragedies which Seneca under the Empire wrote for the arm-chair, not for the stage, and in which he surfeited even the Romans with stoical dignity and superhuman impassibility. Again, comedy suffered from the fact that Rome would tolerate no invasion of private life, as is shown by the fate of Naevius, who expiated by his death in African exile an attack on the powerful family of the Metelli, and an allusion to the private life of the victor of Zama. Besides, these importations from Greece were supported only by the taste, perhaps the affectation, of the rich and noble; the people preferred rope-dancers, as we learn from the Prologue to the "Hecyra" of Terence. Hence we find that the actors despised the verdict of the masses, and were ambitious to appeal to the classes alone. Arbuscula in Horace 2 is indifferent to the hisses of the populace if she can only secure the applause of the Knights. 1 "Ego cum genui tum moriturum scivi et ei rei sustuli. Praeterea ad Trojam cum misi ob defendendam Graeciam Scibam me in mortiferum bellum non in epulas mittere." Satires, I. 9. 76. STRANGE FEATURE IN LATIN TRAGEDY 7 However, that, in spite of these very serious dis advantages, Tragedy at least was held in Early success of Tragedy. no mean estimation at Rome, we gather not only from the great wealth and position attained by the tragic actor Aesopus, but also from the distinct testimony of Horace, who tells us1 that houses thronged with spectators of high position witnessed the reproductions of the works of the Attic dramatists in Rome, where the classes, not the masses, seem to have been able to make or mar the fortunes of the stage. Difficulty in the history of Latin Tragedy. One of the strongest arguments against the authenticity of the early history of Rome is that, though the duration of the monarchy was about two hundred and forty years, yet this period is said to have embraced only seven reigns, an average of about five and thirty years to each reign. The history of Latin Tragedy presents a similar difficulty: three names, Ennius, Pacuvius, and Attius, stand to represent a period of more than a hundred years, from the first Africanus to Sulla. Comedy, not being so distinctly an imported and transplanted novelty, but having a somewhat congenial soil in a country where Fescennine interludes, masques, and Atellane plays were indigenous, would doubtless have taken deeper root but for the stern prohibition of those personalities without which the comic drama can hardly become truly popular or racy of the soil. 1 Epistles, II. 1. 60. The Graeco-Roman drama of Plautus and TerPlautus and ence was really sad under its superficial Terence. gaiety. The complete separation of political from private life, the isolation of women, the dullness of home, the consequent craving for coarse excitement, the demoralization of the slave into his master's pimp, - - all these traits are common to the Rome of Plautus and Terence and to Greece in her decline. The two playwrights felt this. Terence dealt with the phenomena presented to him after the manner of Horace, with a smile and a shrug; Plautus, in the fashion of Juvenal, with fierce indignation and disgust. The fabulae palliatae of Plautus and Terence were succeeded by fabulae togatae, dealing with a lower stratum of society; and finally by tabernariae, which went lower still, until the trabeatae were introduced under Augustus, and took in hand a very high class of society again. This whole distinction between plays vulgar, middle-class, and aristocratic betrays a want of that dramatic sense which ought to tell the playwright that in the true drama of life these classes are mingled and fused, and not distinctly ticketed and kept apart. Hence Rome produced no Euripides, no Shakespeare, no Molière. Their The so-called togatae are represented by a num- Verses to return to these shadowy personalities again, it |